


the taste of your breath on my skin

by blarbles



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Fluff, M/M, Nothing to see here, One-Shots, just boring disconnected fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2018-08-30 17:57:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8543278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blarbles/pseuds/blarbles
Summary: I was still too sad at the end of this horrible week to write any plot, so these are just random rush writes I did today and then posted because why the hell not. The prompt was to write no more than 120 words about each of the five senses. There's no connection between any of the paragraphs--they're just short, quick snapshots arranged chronologically. Not too exciting, folks.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I was still too sad at the end of this horrible week to write any plot, so these are just random rush writes I did today and then posted because why the hell not. The prompt was to write no more than 120 words about each of the five senses. There's no connection between any of the paragraphs--they're just short, quick snapshots arranged chronologically. Not too exciting, folks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was still too sad at the end of this horrible week to write any plot, so these are just random rush writes I did today and then posted because why the hell not. The prompt was to write no more than 120 words about each of the five senses. There's no connection between any of the paragraphs--they're just short, quick snapshots arranged chronologically. Not too exciting, folks.

**Derek ******

1.

After a few months in their new apartment, Laura drags him to a nearby yoga studio that smells of grapefruit. At the end of the practice, when the instructor tells them to lie prone on their backs for corpse pose, he freezes. He looks over at Laura, whose eyes are already closed, her face unlined and calm. He lies down too and tries to relax. Five minutes later, the teacher calls them back to their bodies with small bells held between her fingers. The silver chimes echo through his brain, and as he opens his eyes, he realizes that for the first time since the fire, he didn’t feel defenseless with his eyes closed. 

2\. 

He doesn’t think Stiles even notices he’s doing it, but when he’s stressed, he bites his lower lip. Derek watches him across Deaton’s surgical table. Even with his vision hazy and unfocused and turning violet at the edges, Stiles’ bright lips stand out like a smear of bright red paint on a blank canvas. He grips Derek’s hand in his own, leans his head close enough that Derek can feel Stiles’ breath against his flushed cheek. Stiles bites his lip hard enough to draw blood, and for a second, before the world turns even darker, Derek imagines he tastes the coppery sweetness of it on his own tongue.

3.

The freckles on his face are constellations, his honey-brown eyes deep and warm. But how is Derek supposed to stay focused on Stiles’ face when he has hands like a pianists’, delicate fingers that swim through the air to bring his words to life whenever he talks? He dreams, sometimes, about the night in the pool—those slim fingers grasping at his shirt, arms wrapped around his breathless chest. How cold Stiles’ fingertips must have been, and how warm they felt against his skin as they pulled him up for air.

4.

Coffee tastes like a blunt instrument feels. He can use it to stay awake in a pinch but hates to; the bitterness hits him like a blow to the chest, the cream curdles in his mouth. But he could breathe the scent of peppermint tea for hours. The crispness leaches the tension away from his body, and the random patterns of steam swirling from the mug lift his mind with them. That first winter back in Beacon Hills, every time he went to the coffee shop when Stiles was on shift, there was always a fresh cup waiting for him like magic, like an old friend.

5.

It was his dad’s Christmas tradition—put up as many candles in the windows as possible, fill each room with light so the house shone on December nights. Stiles must have seen the house when he was little and remembered how it lit up in winter like a fairytale, because when Derek opens his door on the morning of Christmas Eve for a solitary run, he nearly steps on a bag of small electric tea lights. He spends the morning setting them in precise rows along the sill of each window. At night, he switches them on. The sparse apartment turns gold and warm. 

 

**Stiles ******

1.

When he wasn’t yet tall enough to see across the kitchen countertop, the kitchen was often full of the smell of flour and pungent yeast. In his mind’s eye, he sees his mom’s arms dusted white, elbow-deep in dough that sighs loudly every time she punches into it. But he can’t remember her face—only the mole on her right wrist, the tumble of brown hair down her back, her sky-blue apron, and the muted scent of flour dust she left in her wake. 

2.

The frost-tipped grass beneath his feet crackles faintly and then crunches under his heel. When he looks back, he hears rather than sees the trail of his footsteps scored into the frosty grass leading from the forest to Laura’s body. Derek Hale materializing in the middle of the woods, soundless and staring straight through him, makes his heart stop. Damn, he thinks, startled into accidentally meeting Derek’s blistering gaze. The world around them is quiet.

3.

Scott tells him he feels the moon like a constant tug in his chest, even when the moon is invisible in the middle of the day, even when it’s circling the other side of the world. Sometimes, Stiles thinks being chained to the earth like that is his worst fear. Other nights, when the moon is full and the wolves tear through the woods, howling, he can’t take his eyes off of it. Watching the moon from his bedroom window is the only thing that makes him feel perfectly still during the long lonely night. 

4.

His body is no stranger to pain. He’s fallen out of trees and off monkey bars, stumbled into every inanimate object that’s crossed his path. But until Gerard Argent, no one’s ever written bruises on his body to be read like a scroll. After his dad leaves him with an ice pack in a house that no longer feels safe, Stiles tallies each of the finger-sized bruises that circle his arms and neck. He studies the split across his face in the mirror, pulls up his shirt to see wine-colored patches spreading across his back and stomach. He presses a finger to each spot of pain and closes his eyes against the feeling.

5.

Sweat is second only to spit in the list of bodily fluids that completely disgust him. So why does he keep waking up, flushed and aching, with his mouth tasting of salt? The wolves aren’t shy about modesty—they slip in and out of clothes before and after they shift, none of them caring that Stiles is so flustered he turns pink. One goddamn fight too many, he tells himself, that must be it. Adrenaline and his own hyperactive hormones—the only reasons he dreams of running his tongue across the sweat-slicked skin of someone’s—he refuses to name them in the cold light of day—warm body that arches beneath his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please take care of yourselves this week. Sometimes it seems like there's only hate in this world, but you're good and strong. I love you. <3 Thanks so much for reading this very short, very bland fic--the next one will be longer and actually interesting, I promise.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eh, I guess I'll make this the place where I dump my random plot-less writing exercises. Read if you want! Pretty short and boring little drabbles here. <3

1.

You wake up and it’s dark, but you're five and the dark doesn’t bother you. In fact, you prefer it: night bleeds color from the room and smears each object into the next, turning them new and beautiful and mysterious. Boundaries melt. Sometimes you wish you could live here where everything is one—you and the stuffed animals and your brother sleeping in the top bunk. You hug the darkness and your brother’s warm, heavy breaths to you and fall asleep. 

2.

Seven year olds aren’t too old to be read to sleep by their mothers, no matter what your older sister says. Your favorite is the one about the woman who was a seal until a man stole her pelt and hid it away, trapping her inside herself. She searched and searched for her spotted grey skin, but he’d burnt it up, maybe, or locked it away with the gnashing moths. In the end, her daughter finds her own skin and leaves land behind, trading gruff humanity for sleek silver bodies. The mother stands on the shore and watches her daughter, and she’s never whole again. 

3\. 

You’re eight, and the world is all amethyst and gold, chrysanthemum and scarlet. The sun rises and sets and you’re going to live forever. The puppies scramble in the grass and whine for comfort they get immediately from parents and siblings. When you grow up you’re going to be as strong as your mom and as gentle as your dad. Your sister swipes your ankle with her paw, annoyed that you haven’t joined them yet; you grin wide and let the color drop from your world, replaced with scents and sounds that blossom brighter than rainbows.

4.

At eleven, you spend half your time in one skin, half in another. The trouble is you don’t know how to be both at once, and from what you can tell of human behavior, you don’t think you’re supposed to be. You can’t be human and animal. You can’t be both the nice boy and the sad one. You can’t want to kiss a boy one day and a girl the next. You’re meant to be both, or one, and if you can’t master the balancing act everyone else has, you’re nothing.

5.

You wake up, fifteen, next to a woman you don’t trust. No, that can’t be right; she brought you here, didn’t she? She’s kind to you, isn’t she? And if she wasn’t—if she wasn’t, it must have been your fault, because it couldn’t be hers. You make yourself as small as possible and edge away, but you don’t know why. You hold your breath, terrified to wake her, but you don’t know why. Beside you she breathes deep, content, a sleeping tiger.

6.

Eighteen, and every time you wake up, dark is all it is.

7.

A year later, and everything has—is—might be about to change. That’s what the sunlight suggests, shifting in the trees as cold grass kisses your toes. The boy and his friend scramble from the clearing, and you close your eyes and count to calm down, a trick from when you were little. After all, they were trespassing—violating a grave, several graves, even. But to your surprise, there’s nothing to calm down about. Your gaze slips over to the trees the boy slipped through, and you count those instead. You don’t notice the smile on your face as you imagine you’re counting down the seconds until he comes back.


	3. Everything You Are (Everything You’re Not)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: references to rape/non-con, ptsd. post-nogitsune.

_(sometimes you are nothing)_

Some days you’re no more than a body. If pricked, you bleed, but your nerves forget to feel. If slammed against a counter, the palm of your hand turns red but doesn’t sting. If your body is hungry or cold or tired or thirsty, it lies down or shuffles to the sink without you. You don’t know where you are when this happens; you must exist, but only as a void. An absence. A body filled to the brim with a dark sea, a sky without stars, whatever used to hover inside drowned to icy numbness. 

_(sometimes you’re all lies)_

Years ago, when it was just the two of you, your sister grew to notice the days when nothing but your bones kept you on your feet. Sometimes she flitted around you like a moth, near your shoulder and then away again, unsure of landing. Other times, she went out and returned with the oddest things—lavender in jars, roses, curry from the Thai place down the road, thin-crust pizza with mozzarella rounds and basil. She set them in front of you like talismans, as if the scent of something beautiful could call you back into yourself, and then she’d sit on the couch by your still body without touching you. She’d wait the minutes or hours until you finally felt her there and blinked yourself back. If the food and her warm brown eyes weren’t enough to trick you into yourself, she’d leave a blanket beside you when she slipped into the other room.

_(sometimes you’re all truths)_

She died and you thought the void would swallow you whole. It might have, if you hadn’t had a slew of incompetent teenagers to deal with, felt responsible for once you knew who caused their lives to veer so drastically off course; sheltered long enough that they realized the spikes you threw out were for their protection as well as your own. Long enough that they became a family. Your family.

They all know the feeling, to some extent—their bodies at one point consumed by something at first utterly foreign, then succumbed to by necessity. But the wolf is different. The wolf is, at its most fundamental, _you,_ though some wolves take a lifetime to learn this, and some—the ones who step into the bottom of a river and never come out, or the ones who rage wild and packless by choice through city streets—never learn it at all.   
But some of you are different. Some of you have bodies hijacked for a time by someone else, and some of you know that when your body is stolen, your mind is stolen with it. Even when they’re returned, not every piece comes back, and those that do don’t fall perfectly into place.

_(sometimes you forget)_

Some days, you meet the witch’s fierce green eyes and scan her porcelain skin necklaced with scars and know her mind is pulled, again against her will, to the jagged earth she was forced to claw a corpse from. You feel her fingernails pried away and her pain and terror and the panic-white sheet of her mind when she realized she couldn’t stop. You glance into your spark’s brown eyes suddenly gone cold and blank and remember when they overflowed with darkness. Shadow ironed to the insides of his fingertips and the soles of his feet, seared to his ribcage and bolted to his brain. A demon using his skin as a coat and wielding his power and care as a weapon. 

_(sometimes you remember)_

And sometimes when the two of them look at you, they see what your sister saw: bone and skin and muscle propping up a hollow core. They see what you see: teeth bared in a smile like a tiger’s. Words manipulated and warped beyond meaning. Mind suddenly sluggish, limbs paralyzed, unable to flinch away from an icy palm pressed flat against you like a warning, holding you down like a threat.

_(sometimes you are infinite)_

Wherever you are—shopping, hunting, in a crowd—you watch them move. Your pack, your family. Checking for even breath by habit, picking out their steady pulses in the hum of a crowd. They do the same to you, and when it used to make you prickly, now it makes you warm.   
It’s taken time— _years_ —but you've become eight hearts tuned to the same note. Each, in your own ways, learning to breathe again. 

With them, you flicker to life, over and over, the choice conscious and hard and _painful_ every time, and you’re not whole, not quite. But you're them, you’re you, you’re everything at once. It hurts but you’re alive.

And sometimes, with them, that’s enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from a vienna teng song that is the literal opposite in tone and meaning of this short ramble, but here we are.

**Author's Note:**

> Please take care of yourselves this week. Sometimes it seems like there's only hate in this world, but you're good and strong. I love you. <3 Thanks so much for reading this very short, very bland fic--the next one will be longer and actually interesting, I promise.


End file.
